Edward Schiappa. The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999. x + 230 pages. Maureen Daly Goggin. Authoring A Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post‐World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Manwan, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000. vii‐xxviii + 262 pages. $59.95 cloth. Ann E. Berthoff. The Mysterious Barricades, Language and Its Limits. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 191 pages. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter. The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth‐Century American Delsartism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. 152 pages + 17 photographs and illustrations. $55.00 hardcover. Brenda Jo Brueggemann. Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1999. 336 pages. $49.95 cloth. Laura Gray‐Rosendale. Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in Interaction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. vii‐xiv + 191 pages. $39.95 cloth. $19.95 paper.

The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece by Edward Schiappa. Yale UP, 1999; 225 pp. Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Plato's Dream of Sophistry by Richard Marback. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press (1999): 147 pp. Reality by Design: The Rhetoric and Technology of Authenticity in Education by Joseph Petraglia. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. 202 pp. Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy & Its Humanist Reception by Kathy Eden. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997.

Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity to the Renaissance by Cheryl Glenn. Southern Illinois UP, 1997. 235 pp. Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. by Jean Grondin. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Xviii & 233 pages. Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader. Edited by Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Xxiv & 407 pages. Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy by Barbara Herrnstein‐Smith. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts. London, England. 1997. 221 pp. The Rhetoric of Reason: Writing and the Attractions of Argument by James Crosswhite. Madison: U. Wisconsin Press, 1996. 329 pages. Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education by James S. Taylor. Albany: SUNY, 1998. 211 pp.

T he critical commonplace that rhetoric simply declined in direct proportion to rise of Romanticism has thankfully come under increasing scrutiny. In 1989, for example, Susan Jarratt questioned Donald C. Stewart's observation that the most notable feature of history of rhetoric in nineteenth century was its absence (73) and established constitutive role of rhetoric in literary and critical writings of Victorian Walter Pater. More recently, Don Bialostosky and Lawrence Needham have argued that the hesitancy of of rhetoric to consider political, cultural, or material factors when discussing rhetoric and Romanticism has been due to their willingness to accept at face value what Romantic authors have said about writing. For example, they have accepted uncritically pronouncements about Romantic genius that place author outside lines of dependency and relationship-and beyond concerns of rhetoric. Consequently, they write, historians of rhetoric have been curiously ahistorical in their accounts of rhetoric and Romanticism . (8). And just last year, almost as if in response to Bialostosky and Needham's assessment, Rex Veeder demonstrated how political and rhetorical principles informed Romantic pulpit practice in nineteenth century. He finds that What Romantics suggest is that purpose of art, including art of writing, is rhetorical in that it encourages act of identification and by so doing allows auditors to transcend their world view through imaginative participation with another (316). Rather than dismissing Romantic discourses as arhetorical or contentedly relegating Romantic texts to conservative pedagogies of taste, these rightly inquire into complex political and social conditions that impelled production and reception of Romanticism. Further, they implicitly or explicitly view their work as having important institutional consequences for literary studies, rhetoric, and composition. That is, if Romanticism has often been elided from histories of rhetoric for its aesthetic affiliations, this brand of revisionist historicism takes as its primary political motive opportunity to revisit-and to qualify-such founding Romantic oppositions as imaginary and factual, reading and writing, literary and rhetorical. In words of Bialostosky and Needham, A new investigation of relationship between Romanticism and rhetoric may lead to a rapprochement between literary and rhetorical branches of English studies (as well as between English and Rhetoric departments) whose separation was founded upon and is sustained by commonplace story of end of rhetoric and rise of literature in Romantic period (5).